Disney was struggling in the 1980s. Though it wouldn’t fully recover until The Little Mermaid in 1989, Oliver & Company the year before helped the company get back on course. And casting Billy Joel in his only major acting role helped bolster the film’s success.
Oliver & Company, Billy Joel, and Celebrity Casting
Joey Lawrence, who voiced the titular Oliver, told SYFY Wire about how the casting of Billy Joel as Dodger plus Bette Midler as Georgette was one of the earliest examples of celebrity casting in animation.
“Jeffrey Katzenberg was brought in to save animation for Disney and he took a swing with Oliver & Company,” Lawrence explained. “He said, ‘Let’s get some famous people in it.’ And up to that point, famous people were not associated with animation. It was the old Walt model, which was, ‘I’m gonna close my eyes, you walk in and read, and if your voice matches what I’m thinking, you’ve got the part.’”
“[Katzenberg] said, ‘Listen, we’ve got to do something to get people in the seats. If this doesn’t work, I think animation for Disney is probably gonna be dead,'” Lawrence added.
The casting practice would later be solidified when Disney chose Robin Williams to voice the Genie in Aladdin. But the tradition began with a reluctant Billy Joel. Director George Scribner convinced him to voice Dodger, Oliver’s dog mentor and the film’s version of the Artful Dodger from Oliver Twist.
“Back then, tickets were $3,” Lawrence said about the film’s release, “so it was a huge hit and flooded their coffers with the money to go and proceed with The Little Mermaid. Then they went on that [Renaissance] run, which supplanted them forever.”
The film grossed over $53 million in its initial domestic release. It was the first animated film to gross $100 million worldwide in its initial release. It raked in an additional $21 million during a 1996 re-release
“My greatest memory is that I learned about Billy Joel during that movie,” Lawrence said, “because my dad played me old Billy stuff. I was—what?—9-years-old when I started making that thing. So, [I’m] in the studio with Billy Joel and Bette Midler and Huey Lewis. I mean, it was crazy.”
